just saw a red fox. no more than 10 foot away. it trotted across the back yard, jumped 4 foot up on a pile of wood, then another 3 foot to the top of the brick wall and trotted off – acted more like a cat than a dog. this is even more amazing because we’re in an urban southeast portion of london. now i’m waiting for howling dogs, blowing horns, and the horse herd of rich fat farts in red coats chasing after. i say, old chap, care for a spot of tea?

speaking of tea, or at least beatnik tea, we found some red leaf skunk. now we’re doing the skunk funk.

odd returning to london. we went from cleveland to chicago to london last august when we started traveling. now we’re retracing part of our path – returning to london, south france, cleveland, then moving to chicago to live. by going back to where we’ve been, we find how we’ve changed along the way. it’s easier getting around the second time around. we’re less starry-eyed, though more perceptually appreciative because we see more clearly with our travel educated eyes. easier to set up our own poetry readings this time in london because we did the ground work a year ago on our first visit. who knows who we’ll be by the time we get back to cleveland in october after 14 months of world travel.

we have a black cat asleep on our kitchen table, and we’re grateful. he disappeared for three days, worried the heck out of us – probably to make us miss him so we’d serve him better when he returned.

lady’s trimming my ear hair in a vain vague attempt to make me appear human. have a feeling i’m going to be one of those old men with massive dark ear and nostril hair. may as well make it a fashion statement. i’ll grow both long, then braid each ear’s hair to its closest nostril in a curving free form sideburn sort of way. mine nose mucous for hair gel. the braided loops would eventually grow so long i could put my arms through them like a pair of suspenders and hold myself upright.

this will be my closing poem when lady k has her city poetry reading at the Poetry Cafe aug 17 in Covent Garden (John Clarke, Sue Johns, Patrick Cunnane, The Worm, Lady K, Smith reading followed by open mic). the one time i read this in public, it rather livened up the evening.

You know what time it is?
It’s pumpkin time.

No, not pumpin time
Pumpkin time

cuz at midnight
everything turns into
a pumpkin
and the mice run away

Now midnight you also might
be pumpin pie,
depends on what yer doin
at the time

Somethin
you might be fuckin
might turn into a pumpkin

So you fuckin pumpin
pumpkin pie

watched Michael Moore’s “Sicko” last night. eye opening-est film i’ve ever seen. brings tears to the eyes, shame to the heart. sad to be american oftimes.

there’s a very odd interesting site called Ball and All – it’s a collection of over 500 names with various fotos and bits about each – names ranging from frank zappa through parmahansa yogananda to the three stooges. it’s also the largest non-smith smith site online

go to BallandAll.com
at top of home page, click the Directory By Name box
scroll down to and click on Smith, Steven B
click on foto of smith
a menu of 139 links to fotos, poems, songs, reviews etc will appear
warning – songs are not songs so much as psycho assaults.

speaking of psycho ass alls… cheney’s having his pacemaker batteries replaced – but to have a pacemaker, you need a heart – and we all know cheney is heartless. if we’re lucky, they’ll give him a dead battery.

and they say george if-i-only-had-a-brain bush’s colon polyps turned out to be benign. that’s a laugh – the entire man is a cancer on america’s soul, and needs to be radiated. besides, he’s an asshole inside out, top to bottom.

the cheney-bush beast needs be exorcized.

of course by saying this, i probably put myself on the list of the 400,000 americans to be placed in the secret detention centers that vice dick cheney has halliburton/kbr constructing for when they declare martial law.

re that, this from commondreams.org:

“Meanwhile, last October Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant Congress, put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch. There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in the 50 states even over the objections of the governors of those states.

“Put this together with the wholly secret construction now under way – courtesy of a $385-million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc – of detention camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top Secret, which declares there to be a developing insurgency within the U.S, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States.”

– Published on Friday, July 27, 2007 – “Martial Law Threat is Real” by Dave Lindorff

also according to this article, Attorney General John Ashcroft started a program called Operation TIPS, a network of tens of millions of citizen spies which would have americans turn in their friends and neighbors to the republican nazis. welcome to the brain camps. welcome to the brain cramps.

i could save myself some sorrow by being silent, but silence is a sin – and there are already way too many silence sinners in america.